


This Love That Has No Nature

by temporalDecay



Series: a distrait life of mistakes [4]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: Anal Play, Anal Sex, Body Horror, Bulges and Nooks, Caliginous Romance | Kismesis, Cybernetics, Double Penetration, F/M, Flushed Romance | Matesprits, M/M, Pale Romance | Moirallegiance, double everything, off screen genocide
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-09
Updated: 2013-10-09
Packaged: 2017-12-28 22:08:50
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 18,243
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/997502
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/temporalDecay/pseuds/temporalDecay
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which Sollux Captor is not a Helmsman. He's something worse.</p><p>No SGRUB AU, post successful coup, featuring Sollux "Sack of Purulent, Writhing Bulges" Captor, Terezi "Ain't Taking Your Shit" Pyrope, Aideen "Ruthless Efficiency" Wukong, Feferi "That's Your Imperious Complacence For You" Peixes, Karkat "Because Fuck You That's Why" Vantas and Eridan "Oh Fuck Me, Why" Ampora. Also sex, moral conundrums and cheap beer. Bonus cameo by Aradia "You Don't Wanna Know" Megido.</p>
            </blockquote>





	This Love That Has No Nature

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ashkatom](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ashkatom/gifts).



> One of those tags is not like the others. You should mind it anyway.
> 
> So way back when Distrait was a half-formed idea, I had a conversation with my main beta, who despite handling the worst of my writing, inexplicably remains one of my best friends. And at some point, during that conversation, she dared me to think of a worse fate for Sollux, than becoming a ship engine.
> 
> I tried.
> 
> Dedicated to Ashkatom, for sitting with me and putting up with my whining over Captors being dumb. <3

Hyerad must be eliminated. 

The final statement does not change even as you try to play around with the variables a little. The calculations are precise and unforgiving. Every string of code in charge of measuring the odds gains a voice to bitch at you because each of them has the best solution, despite the fact their solutions are all the same. Hyerad, and its population of sixty million, must be eliminated. 

You kill each screaming process with a twitch of your mind, trying to regain some clarity. 

Or as much clarity as you can have, when sixteen thousand yottabytes squeeze themselves through your consciousness every second, while every single scrap of information uploaded or connected to the imperial network eventually worms its way to you. You copy and split up into a million slivers of consciousness that can squint and study everything, sniffing out threats. Then you assimilate and eat up each other, cannibalizing yourself until you remake yourself and prevent any one of them from reaching some kind of actual independence. And then you do it again. Over and over, you are everywhere, you know _everything_. You have control over every radio, every computer, every cannon, every ship, and every station in the entire galaxy. Nothing can function within Alternian territory without your knowledge at the very least, and most of it requires your explicit approval. Trolls go about their insignificant lives, struggling with their insignificant problems, unaware that you’re there, watching them. Protecting them. There are no secrets, to you, no surprises, only facts. 

And the fact is that Hyerad must be eliminated. 

You tug a few strands of personality and memories and make a small facsimile of yourself to look at the thing critically, now that you have all the facts. You look at the catalog of images, the basic stats of its population. It’s a relatively small planet in the Fringe, conquered just a few sweeps before Feferi rose to power. Most of the population has been left unchecked, since Feferi’s coronation interrupted the colonization process, and it seems they have been content with just being alive. It’s an insignificant planet and the troll casualties will be minimal, as opposed to the potential disaster that would be to let it go on becoming a getaway for the Truvians. But still, you watch the plains and the grasslands and the forests and the rivers and the weird eight-legged fauna. It will be lost, forever, and the idea of leaving something an unknown rattles you. Of course, you can’t dispatch a team to preserve any of it, because that’d give away your intentions. But you wish you could. 

You wish you didn’t have to go through with it. 

You make a kid’s computer explode under their hands for trying to hack into your protocols, jam communications between dozens of flirting couples, short-circuit four hundred different coffee makers and unleash a barrage of porn spam on all the casteist assholes you can think of. Taking out your frustration on them doesn’t really make you feel better, but you like to pretend it does. You have so many redundant protocols to keep you in check that they catch on your emotional outbursts before they even start. Rather than wallowing, however, you tear apart that sliver of yourself, swallowing up the rage and disgust before it uses them to become self-aware. You fucking hate it when that happens, because they give away a weakness you’ve tried your best to have surgically removed from you. You can’t afford weaknesses now, not when you hold so much power on your own. Either side of your brain, left unchecked, would be a disaster. That’s why you keep the processes running simultaneously, that’s why you’ve cut yourself up into thin slices spread like a veil over everything, so that there’s always a corner of yourself to argue with. Someone to disagree with your ideas to ensure you don’t do anything stupid. 

And yet, there are times like these, when no matter how you look at it, the decision is unanimous and horrifying. 

Hyerad must be eliminated. 

You exist in every wire, every capacitor, every battery, every circuit, every connection and every command line. And yet, you are more than a machine. You are more than the sum of all the code you’ve wrapped around you and made in your image. You’re a troll, beneath it all, and no troll can order the annihilation of an entire planet without a second thought. Not, at least, the kind of troll you’d like to think you are. 

Hyerad must be eliminated, yes, but not _right now_. 

You’re a troll, and trolls still have the right to escape crushing responsibility by indulging in the highest form of art: procrastination. 

  


* * *

  


Sending the messages out is instantaneous, and less about sending them and more like telling specific computers to display what you want. 

twinArmageddons [TA] began trolling gallowsCalibrator [GC]

TA: tz  
TA: iim comiing out iin twelve hour2  
TA: 2ee you at the hatch?

twinArmageddons [TA] began trolling carcinoGeneticist [CG]

TA: briing your ugly mug around 2ometiime, kk  
TA: iim 2tartiing two beliieve you really look a2 2hiity a2 poor qualiity securiity camera footage make2 iit 2eem  
TA: one of the2e day2 iim 2eriiou2ly goiing two forget why iid ever want two put my bulge anywhere near you

twinArmageddons [TA] began trolling caligulasAquarium [CA]

TA: hey jerkface  
TA: youre comiing over for a vii2iit  
TA: 2o 2tock up on 2omethiing niice for a change

twinArmageddons [TA] began trolling cuttlefishCuller [CC]

TA: hey ff  
TA: diinner tomorrow?  
TA: iill be on my be2t behaviior and everythiing

twinArmageddons [TA] began trolling rhetoricalRegina [RR]

TA: wukong  
TA: have my quarters set up and ready for me  
TA: eta 15 hrs

The result is the same, however, and the subsequent wait is almost infuriating. You’ve always been impatient by nature, but your nervousness as you wait for them to read your words and compose their replies only serves to justify the need to slow down a little. One by one, you watch them from the myriad of cameras scattered around them and wait for them as they begin to type. If you could, you’d be bouncing in your chair, but given the lack of mobility – or chairs – right now, you content yourself with creating a new encryption system for your servers. You’ve gone through five of them, when the replies finally start to trickle in. 

GC: SUR3  
GC: 1S TH1S 4 R3D OCC4S1ON  
GC: OR 4 BLU3 ON3? 

CG: WHO DIED AND MADE YOU KING, YOU FESTERING PUSTULE IN THE SHIT GASH OF TROLLKIND?

RR: done

CA: rude sol  
CA: my taste in booze is fuckin impeccable  
CA: prepare to havve your mind blowwn awway

CC: I'd lik-E t)(at a lot! 38D

Holding five conversations at the same time doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface of your awareness. Unfortunately, all five of them have limited mental resources and can’t exactly keep up with you. The only one that can keep up with you, is you. Karkat has a lot of reading to catch up with. Terezi is studying case files again. Eridan is in the middle of an audit. Feferi is studying a new law proposal. Wukong is reviewing restocking protocols. You could do all of it in the time it’d take them to say their name, and still have enough processing power to carry on the conversation. But you can’t replace everyone. You do not exist to make your friends obsolete. 

You exist to help and serve and in the process atone for the terrible sin of _being_ you. 

It’s still boring, though, when you’re not consumed by crippling self-loathing and almost unmanageable urges to self-destruct. You have programming in place, to help handle that. You have programming for everything, even to make sure you live on even if you actually die. You recognize the pitfall of an existential rut following that line of thought and force yourself to think of something else. 

Fortunately for you, there is always something else to think about. 

  


* * *

  


Building a person is not unlike building a program. You have the advantage of not having to design a body, since you already have one, half-crippled as it is, so all you have to do is put enough of yourself together to download it back inside your skull. 

A person needs memories, a basic databank so they can process input and base their decisions on it. The first nine sweeps of your life are a given, since you need to remember what it was like to have a troll-like mind, back before you became the thing you are today. You resist the urge to filter the terrifying things and the embarrassing things and the sad things. You refuse to censor yourself or what you’ve done, putting everything you are into the mix. At this stage, without emotions to filter those memories, it’s almost clinical to revisit them. You linger on the night Vriska used you to murder Aradia, always somewhat fascinated by the stark clarity of the memory when it’s not muddled by guilt. You’ve long patched up that loophole in your systems, rendering you immune to psychic control. You are too much now, for any one troll to try and use powers like that to gain control of any part of you. 

Memories after the GEMINI and the DIOSCURI went online are a bit trickier to pick. It’s not like you’ll forget all you know, once you are back inside your own skin, it will just be further away than local storage. You are connected with yourself, all those slivers of yourself. You are a single entity, even when you’ve split yourself into tiny bits and pitted them against each other in a perpetual argument about what is and isn’t acceptable. Even when you go back into your body, you’re still inside the GEMINI and the DIOSCURI, and the connection cannot be broken. Your self, the self your body can house from time to time, is a redundant backup of the most important parts of your being, the indispensable basics that make you _be_ you. An extension of the whole. So even if your think pan doesn’t have the sheer capacity to process information locally at the same rate your mainframe does, you need to give it enough information to access the network. It’s less about controlling your body remotely as it’s about embracing the illusion of independence. Equius came up with the idea for the redundancy protocol, back when you were more of a prototype than anything else. Hence the importance to examine each memory carefully and select the most appropriate ones from the vast stores you keep, so that when the time comes, you will make the right choice. 

It’s all about making the right choice, really. Everything you’ve done, to yourself and others but mostly just yourself. You’ve turned yourself into a thing that can barely be called a troll, all for the sake of not making a wrong choice ever again. Now you know everything, and you know knowing is not all there is to making choices. There is more to it, something no amount of careful, complex coding will ever replicate, no matter how much you try. That strange, unnamed thing that resides between the layers upon layers of circuitry that give you infinite memory storage and inexhaustible processing power. Were you sentimental, you would call it a soul. Most days you deign call it personality. And yours is… well, _yours_. It’s terrible and inadequate and gross and if you could, you would cut it up and down and fix it into something passable, but you can’t because _it’s who you are_. So you make a copy of that chunk of unintelligible disasters that is yourself and put it inside your skull along with the worst and the best memories of your life, and by the time you’re done it’s been nearly ten hours since you sent your messages. 

And this, this is the hard part. This is where everything can fail, where no matter what, you keep expecting something to fail, because it’s the most likely time. And statistics are your thing, these days, so of course you conjure up a few every time, because it’s easier to cough up numbers than admit you’re scared. You watch, through the eyes of several dozen cameras, as the containment tube is lowered slowly from the ceiling into the center of the control block. 

That’s a bit of a misnomer, really. There’s nothing to be controlled there, but it’s the closest any one creature who isn’t you can get to you. There are some nice, decoy screens with a few chairs sitting before them and even a couple keyboards, which are connected to nothing and bear absolutely no impact in your programming or your consciousness. But it’s better if trolls think there is an off switch, even when there isn’t, because what would be of the Empire if they knew to what extent it is you, and not their fuchsiablooded Empress, who has absolute control of everything that is worth controlling in their Empire? The DIOSCURI and the GEMINI are but nice, polite lies told to trollkind as a whole, because most trolls wouldn’t understand what you are, exactly, and those who would, would try to use it to their advantage. There is no “Digital Information, Organization and Security of the Core Uplink and Related Infrastructures” and no “General Encrypted Module for the Imperial Network and Intranet”. There is only Sollux Captor, the Ghost in the Wires, who sees everything, knows everything and controls everything. 

The hardest part of launching your pet projects online was to sit with Equius and come up with pretentious enough acronyms for them. 

The surface of the tube is cold and frosted over, enough that vapor rises from it as it comes to a quiet stop. You’ve downloaded all the pertinent information back into your body, but now you need to reboot it, for lack of a nicer term. And there’s always a chance it won’t work. There’s always a chance something will fail, because it’s made of flesh and bone, and not scrupulously built machinery. Flesh rots. Bones break. Your body is not made to withstand stasis like this, and only Feferi’s gift of life makes it possible. Slowly, the liquid inside the tank is heated up, gradually, and you can’t help but think of those frozen dinners you’d thaw out when you were a kid and Aradia was coming for a visit, so you needed to pretend you were actually taking good care of yourself. Those days are gone, now, and Aradia has not scolded you for anything you’ve done since the night you murdered her, instead offering the same warm, patient support that, even with all you know now, you still can’t quite explain. The consistency of the liquid changes, turning more like water and less like gel, and the small electric pulses travel through it straight into your skin, testing the reaction of nerves as the complicated forest of cables along your spine provides harsher, louder pulses that force your slumbering nervous system to wake up. 

There’s less than a millionth of a picosecond when everything under your command ceases functioning as you focus all of your considerable attention on your body and whether your bloodpusher will beat or not. Then you go about smoothing over all those potential disasters, and limit your awareness of your body to the corner that constructed the programming that now inhabits it. It takes another hour for the flow of blood to stabilize and for organs to stumble into something resembling working order. By then you’re certain you won’t die – the part of you that can still die, that is, since the death of your body would do very little to the rest of you, except annoy you – so you begin the last leg of preparations. 

Terezi has been standing outside the thick, metal doors that seal your chambers from the world for the better part of nine hours now. You’ve kept an eye on her, but you haven’t spoken, after cutting your previous conversation short. She stands tall and resolute, hands folded elegantly over the head of her cane, and keeps up the pretense that she’s staring intently at the sealed doors. She’s probably meditating. Or trying to decide what to have for lunch. The point is that she’s early and she’s been there for hours now, but you knew she would be, because that’s how Terezi does things. You were counting on her being early, anyway, because the last steps of the process are easier with the help of someone with actual limbs. 

The doors hiss as they open into a narrow corridor fit with security that includes cameras, lasers, turrets and one prototype for a lethal neurotoxin mister that is currently stocked up with laughing gas while you finish working out the kinks in the dispenser. There are no locks to that door, no way to forcing them open if you don’t want them to be. The corridor stretches into another set of doors, which you dutifully open for her. And then another. And another. Until she finally reaches the control block, still quite far away from your core, hidden away behind an impenetrable wall that’s at least ten times thicker than the hull of the ship itself. It doesn’t matter if the _Dream Chaser_ is destroyed, and your core with it, the way you’re designed you can survive so long as even the smallest remnant of the imperial network still exists. But it’s always a good idea to have a bluff or two under your sleeve, and you’ve endeavored to make your core into a suitable one, leaking specific details about just how bloody hard it’d be to destroy it to the right people, so they’ll focus on that instead of things that might actually be dangerous. Terezi is, as always, completely unimpressed by the careful display of technology around her, coming to stand by the tank where your body floats like a lifeless rag in a translucent green liquid that goes from murky to crystal clear with a soft pulse of the right voltage. 

“I do hope we’re doing this sometime today,” she says crisply, grinning at nothing in particular as she sends her cane into the depths of her sylladex. “I am a very busy troll, I’ll have you know. Places to be, people to do.” 

Rather than reply directly, you drain the tube through grates at the bottom, connected to an entirely different system. Really, the hardest part of designing this core was figuring out how to handle your body and all its needs. Terezi’s lip twitches slightly as you lift the tube away, leaving your body hanging there, shivering as your skin breaks out in goosebumps from the temperature change, several hundred cables still attached to your head and down your spine. She reaches out to hold you, hands under your armpits, as the main supports around your waist are removed. You’ve always been skinny but these long periods stuck in stasis leave you frankly skeletal, and Terezi holds you like you weight nothing. A myriad of robotic arms descend from the ceiling, all fitted with delicate, precision pincers that they use to pluck the neural needles stuck into your back, one by one. Your body convulses in Terezi’s arms as your nerve endings suffer the abuse without any real way to react to it. You always forget how long the needles are and how obscene your body looks, spine glistening and on display beneath the hundreds of ports grafted straight into it. The last four ones, nearly two inches long and pulled straight from your skull, look particularly nasty, where they interface directly with your pan. The sensation is tingling and horrifying, and your body shudders as it’s left bare. 

The arms braid the knot of cables away and pull it up to rest inside the tube hidden in the ceiling, while one of them reaches down to offer two containers to Terezi. She carefully takes off her gloves and dips her fingers first into the sterilizing gel, saying nothing of how cold it is, before slathering the sealing gel, made of the same substance that your body was floating in, all the way from the base of your spine to the curve of your neck. You can feel the ports reacting to the gel, closing up as it crusts over them, blocking them away because you can’t just walk around with most of your spine oozing out your back. With infinite patience and delicate fingers, she spreads the gel on the ports in your head, careful to not let your hair get caught in it. 

You sever the active connection as Terezi slides the mask off your face and pulls at the tube that kept your airsacks from collapsing under extended pressure, just so you’ll experience the whole sensation of a thin, plastic tube crawling its way out of your throat all on your own. A stray arm reaches out to grab the mask and the tube, and then it’s done. You cough violently, airsacks burning as they struggle to remember how to work, but Terezi holds you against her body while you finish sorting out yours, and it’s okay. You’re alive. You’re mostly alright. 

“You’re an idiot,” she says, and with sickeningly loving gesture reaches out to wipe spit off your lips. “And absolutely disgusting.” 

“Fuck you,” you rasp, voice barely a whisper, and reach out to wrap your tired limbs around her, because she’s your moirail and you’ll never feel safer than when you’re resting against all her sharp edges and pointy corners. “I’m fucking perfect.” 

Terezi cackles at that, just like you knew she would, and the sound is like a soothing balm that makes the world not suck as much as it did, ten seconds prior. You slump in her arms, and it doesn’t matter if you’re naked and weakened at all, because she’s got you, and she’d rather destroy the universe than see you hurt. 

“You’re a fucking disaster,” Terezi sighs, fondly fingering your hair and further tucking your limbs against hers. “Worst pitiful wreck I ever knew.” 

“Do you know a lot about pitiful wrecks?” You say, letting your head rest in her hand as she tilts it up, staring up at her and reveling in the limited resources inside your skull, because you could reach out to the network and the rest of yourself, but you don’t have to. You have enough to feel like you really are a troll. Terezi tilts your head back, so you’re facing her entirely. “Should I be worried? Or just jealous?” 

“I know all about pitiful wrecks, because I’m always looking for a way to replace you,” she replies, unflinchingly sincere, but you can only smile. “I’m always trying to find someone who’s pitiful enough to be worth it but not enough of an asshole to hurt me the way you do.” 

“You won’t find anyone,” you chuckle acidly, “because I hurt you as much as you need to be hurt and always ask all the questions you’re too damn scared to ask yourself. You love me for all the horrible things I could do and because you like to think you are the reason I don’t do most of them.” 

Her lips are cool and thin against yours, and her kisses are like declarations of war, each one stealing more of your mind than the one before. You’ve gone boneless beyond the very definition of the word. You surrender to her, to be anything she thinks you should be, to let her make you in her image for as long as it’ll last. 

“I love you, Sollux Captor,” she says eventually, pressing her forehead to yours, so you can see her ruined eyes behind her glasses, “because it’s my serendipity given _right_.” 

Goosebumps break all over your skin again. 

“Pale for you,” you say, like a spell that will ward off the uncertainties. 

She kisses you again, and holds you while you laugh and cry and laugh yourself to sleep. 

  


* * *

  


“You’re lurking,” you say, not looking at the woman by the doorway and instead studying the array of food placed on your table. “That’s creepy.” 

“Due all respect,” Wokong muses, in a tone that lets you know all due respect is none at all, “I do believe you have a monopoly on both lurking and all things creepy.” There’s a pause, measured and controlled. “My lord.” 

She’s taller than you, with a meanspirited tilt to her chin that all casteist assholes have when they look at you and see a lowblood stepping outside his station. The bizarre thing about Aideen Wukong is that she’s never been a problem. She’s the only member of staff from the _Battleship Condescension_ and she was transferred into the _Dream Chaser_ , because she took one look at Feferi after her duel with the previous Empress and started snapping orders to get the new Empress properly taken care of. Since then, she’s never been a problem, always fulfilling her duties bordering on perfection. She served half a century under the Condesce’s reign, before bowing to Feferi, but she’s not a loyalist. She’s not an anything, really. She keeps to herself, no quadrants, no real friends, nothing but her duty and the strange pleasure she seems to derive from excelling at it. If she believes in the hemospectrum as envisioned by Feferi’s predecessor, she’s never made it obvious. She obeys her orders without question and then sinks into the shadows, ghosting about the ship and ensuring it runs as it should. 

You asked her once, why she always hesitates before calling you lord, and rather than pointing out your age or your blood, all she said was that she found it hard to see a troll with such a refined taste for self-destruction as a lord. But that she’d endeavor for your sake. That was about the time you decided you liked her, this tealblood bitch who seems to care for nothing but the wellbeing of her ship. You fueled rumors about her in the right circles, fostering the legend of the Imperial Head Administrator, just to see how she’d react. She had the nerve not to notice. These days, she chats with you about nothing in particular and plays chess with you to keep you from collapsing into a black hole of boredom. 

You think that might make you friends, but you’ve never been really good at making friends and you’re certain you’d kill Wukong at the smallest sign of trouble, which is not something one should say about their friends, either. 

“It’s like you’re trying to fatten me up,” you tease, crooked fangs making your smile almost a snarl as you wave a fork over the various plates in front of you. 

“I think my fans might weight more than you do,” Wukong says, half smirking and leaning on the wall by the door. “So yes, I might be. Someone must make sure you don’t kill yourself, what with all your attempts.” 

“My moirail might take offense,” you grin, stabbing a square of meat with the fork and popping it into your mouth, where it nearly melts before you get a chance to chew. “You might’ve heard of her,” you go on, mouth full, “scariest tealblood in this ship? Packs a bit of a punch when mad.” 

“Don’t flatter yourself… My lord,” she sneers without an ounce of fear. “I’d much sooner cut off my hand than try to pap your underfed face.” She pulls out a fan from her sylladex, and begins to move it almost lazily. You think the gesture might be a threat, considering that’s her specibus and you know for a fact she’s remarkably good at killing folk with those. She takes your silence as permission to go on, smirk tugging the left corner of her mouth. “I am merely doing my job.” 

“Am I part of your job, now?” You stab another morsel without really looking, arching both eyebrows at her. 

“You’re part of the ship, aren’t you?” Her smile is cruel. “And it is my duty to ensure this ship is run as best as possible. So that means I ought to keep you alive, despite your rather elaborate attempts to do otherwise.” 

Something old and wounded and deliciously _irrational_ rises to the surface, pushing under your skin. You want to break her neck. You _can_ break her neck, with very little effort. Your powers haven’t gone away simply because you have little to no use for them anymore. But you will not give her the satisfaction. 

“I’m not a ship,” you say instead, slow and measured enough that she can’t mistake your displeasure for anything else. 

“Oh well, not in the way you’d have been once, no,” and she says once in such a gentle way, you admire her for the sheer balls she has to have to use that tone with you. “But you’re still part of this ship, in your own way and by your own doing. As far as I’m aware, that puts you under my care… My lord.” 

“Tell me more about how suicidal I am,” you narrow your eyes at her, lisp a veritable nightmare, “when you’re pushing this line of conversation.” 

“I’m not pushing anything,” she chuckles, “you’re having a fit and trying to blame it on me. Here I am, just trying to make sure you don’t waste away to nothing, and you’re stubbornly hung up on technicalities.” 

“If you think—“ 

“Eat,” she interrupts, without a care, arching an eyebrow at you. “You won’t be getting any of those fizzy energy drinks you like so much until you’ve eaten at least two full meals. Three, if any piece of technology in my possession malfunctions even a little bit.” 

“And why the hell would I do what you say, like you’re somehow entitled to order me around?” 

That smirk is everything you like about her, on display all at once. 

“Because you like fighting for what you want,” she steps over to your table and steals a morsel for herself, smug, “and because you like to pretend you’re not the closest to omniscient and omnipotent a troll has ever been.” 

“Perhaps I ought to call myself god, then,” you snort, shoving another forkful of meat into your mouth with a roll of your eyes. “Might get some respect then.” 

“You’ll get a bunch of empty-headed kids burning their husktops in the altar of your devotion, and perhaps make the Chancellor smile more often at the idea, but little else.” There was a pause, measured and purposeful. “Now eat your dinner… My lord.” 

You grin, against your better judgment, and she returns it easily enough. Deliberately, you reach for a cup of wine, mock toasting at her, before taking a sip. Wukong chuckles and shakes her head, before turning to leave again. 

“You know,” you say, just as she reaches the door, “one day, that tongue of yours is going to get you culled.” 

She snorts. 

“Everyone keeps saying that,” she doesn’t bother to look back, “but nothing ever comes of it.” 

You watch her go, purposely limited to your body’s senses and not the near endless perspective of the cameras all around you, back ramrod straight and steps firm, and muse to yourself that perhaps you ought to get friends who don’t share your desire to live only to die. She’s right, though, at least in so far as the state of your body goes, and once you’re alone, you content yourself with eating at your leisure. You’ve never found meals to be a source of pleasure, food mostly serving as fuel for your body to keep functioning, though you appreciate the irony in having this kind of feast all to yourself, when you grew up on scraps of sugar and things you told yourself were meat for the sake of your peace of mind. 

It’s things like this, the quiet moments alone, when it really does begin to sink in what you’ve done. Sometimes, you find yourself stuck trying to fix a faulty subroutine and imagine you wake up to find yourself inside the helmblock of a random ship, stripped of everything and being force fed your own delusions to keep you in check. 

You wish Aradia would be here to help nudge you out of such thoughts, but as soon as you turn your mind to her, you force yourself to think of something else. It’s not the time and you can’t afford to get lost in that kind of musing, for what little it’d impact the rest of you. You finish your meal and head back to your quarters, to bathe and get dressed in something a little more substantial than a bathrobe. Terezi will drop by later on, and perhaps you can have a civilized conversation that doesn’t end up with you two biting at each other’s ankles, though you doubt that very much. It’s nice to pretend, at least, that your quadrants aren’t such a fucked up mess, until you remember the source of it all is you, and not them. Karkat and Terezi and Feferi and Aradia, they were all fine, before you dragged them down the spiral of despair and hurt that is being in a relationship with you. 

You’ve long given up on guilt, however, if nothing else because there isn’t enough guilt in the known universe to sate you. Guilt gets nothing done, and the night Equius cut you open and slid the first port into your spine, you vowed to get things done. You are the anchor of the Empire, whether they know it or not, holding everything together for the sake of giving trolls at least the tiniest hope of moving past the reign of horror that was the Condesce’s rule. Feferi’s is its own brand of horror sugarcoated on dreams and promises that might never be fulfilled, but your job is to take on those burdens that would break her and ensure she can at least foster the hope for something better. 

You stare at the rows and rows of clothes someone – probably Wukong – got for you, all in expensive fabrics and stylish cuts, with your sign boldly emblazoned in gold and accents in blue and red. You finger the cuffs of a coat you’ve never worn in your life, and remember the hardest part of being who you are is not being in the core. It’s nice, in there, even if your body slowly rots away. Because then clothes and food and all these thousand little annoyances people have to worry about don’t matter. People themselves don’t matter. And that’s precisely why you crawl out of stasis every now and then, forcing yourself to relearn a body that’s steadily wasting away, because you _need_ the people to matter. 

You choose the simplest uniform variation available, which is still ostentatious enough, and put it on by hand instead of using the wardrobifier, purely for the sake of forcing your fingers to work on the more delicate task of sorting out buttons and zippers. You eye the coat disdainfully, as the hood makes it look more like some FLARP attire than anything else, but the ports at the back of your head are pretty obvious without cover and it wouldn’t do to let people ask questions. Most of trollkind is convinced you’re some kind of practitioner of the occult, anyway, which is a polite way they think you’re some kind of freak that believes he’s a mage of some sort. Better that than them knowing the truth, anyway. 

You take a moment to breathe deeply, take stock of every limb, and then head out to take a stroll and maybe remind the damn staff that they should be terrified of you. 

  


* * *

  


Your Ancestor is in the gardens, as usual. 

It’s still somewhat surreal to even think about it, to have confirmation of something you grew up deriding as a highblood myth. Ancestors and inheritance were things you mocked plenty of times, because you refused to even consider that what some idiot who shared most of your DNA did, hundreds or even thousands of sweeps before your time, would have some kind of impact on your life. An yet, the fact remains that the Helmsman is as real as you are, and for all you chose it on your own, your fate mirrors his quite a bit. You never know how to act around him, what to say to him, because you refuse to admit you want his approval, and yet the way you carry yourself around him betrays you. He might just be the one person in the entire universe who could understand you, but he won’t even deign to talk with you. Most of the time he won’t even look at you. 

The worse thing is when he _does_ look at you, and you can tell, without a shadow of doubt, that he’s disappointed in you. It’s irrational and you hate it, because you owe him nothing. He has no hold over you, and no reason at all to expect anything from you. 

Most of all, though, _because_ _you’re not a disappointment_. 

You’re a monster, admittedly. A self-professed asshole of the highest caliber. One day they will write entire epics about your capacity for spite and pettiness, yes, but you’re not a disappointment. You’ve done many a stupid thing in your life, and caused pain and suffering in the people you wanted most to keep safe and sound, but you didn’t let that stop you. The Empire indoctrinated you, since the moment you hatched, with visions of the helmblock and a future where your mind and your powers and your body would be taken from you, but you would be forced to live on and endure it. And you took all of that - the taunting, the gloating, the sneering – and shoved it back into their face. So you grafted yourself into a ship in the end, yes, but it’s not your powers that define you, it’s your mind. None of what you’ve ever done relies on your powers as a psionic, not since the night Aradia died. It’s all about how much smarter than everyone else you are. How you took their systems and turned them on their head, and then made sure they would never get them back. 

But he doesn’t care about that, he doesn’t _see_ that. 

_You’re a fool_ , he told you, the first and only words he ever deigned to give you, long after they cut him free from the wreckage of his ship. You told yourself you didn’t care, that it didn’t matter what he thought, because he didn’t know how things work now, not the way you do. But something inside you raged at him for the comment and never really stopped raging, angry and offended and _hurt_. What does he know of your choices and your loss, to call you a fool? What does he know about waking up in the ashes of your matesprit’s hive, staring in horror at what you’d done? What does he know about having her come back, without warning and without explanation, carrying your moirail in her arms? What does he know about watching your kismesis slowly fall apart under stress and having to creatively figure out new, impressive ways to keep him whole? A thousand sweeps in the helm, ten thousand sweeps, a hundred thousand sweeps in the helm. Who the fuck cares? He still doesn’t know enough to have any right to call you foolish. He’s everything you never wanted to be, and everything you’ll never be, thanks to what you’ve done to yourself. You could have so easily been him, and yet you made damn sure you’re not. In a world that tried to define you by your powers and your usefulness as a living battery to a nameless ship, you proved yourself smarter and stronger in all the ways that really matter. You made a fool out of everyone around you, and perfected the art of being _better_ than them. There was nothing foolish, in your decision to wrestle away control of the Empire from the Condesce and her system. There was nothing foolish in putting the fear of you in every single one of them. There’s nothing foolish in loving who you love and hating who you hate, and if he can’t understand it, then he has no business judging it. 

You take a deep breath and allow the anger to diffuse before you even attempt to approach him. The gardens are primarily Kanaya’s, part of Feferi’s continuous attempts to pay back for having gotten her killed in the process of securing her support within the brooding caves. Special lamps and an array of complex projectors create the illusion of the Alternian sky on the high vaulted ceiling, while judicious use of engineering and resource management have fostered a replica of the gardens Kanaya planted in Feferi’s Alternian palace. It’s quite a feat of ingenuity, and one of the most gossiped about throughout the Empire, that the Empress would squander away valuable resources for something so fundamentally useless as a garden. Personally, you don’t really care about the politics of the whole thing, you like the gardens because they make Feferi happy and because they make for a nice place to walk around and relearn how your body works. Evidently, your Ancestor shares that opinion. 

You take another deep breath and make your way to him, falling in step with his measured stride. 

“So,” you say, looking at him from the corner of your eye, “still suffering Wukong’s attempts at dressing us up, huh.” 

The silence is expected, but you were hoping for at least a disdainful snort. He doesn’t speed up his wobbling at least, which you suppose is a small victory. You choose not to remember the fact he really can’t speed up his hobbling, as it is, considering his body is possibly even weaker and more broken than yours. Politely, you keep yourself from staring at the scars. 

“You’d remember Wukong, I hope? Tall, bitchy, hyper efficient tealblood? The one that usually chases you down until you eat? Yeah.” You shrug lightly. “I think she has a thing for our thing with red and blue. Or well, I have a thing with red and blue, so she probably just assumes you do, too. Feel free to tell her otherwise. Or tell her anything, really. You’ve already broken the record a non-mute troll has pretended to be mute, so it’s not like anyone’s ever going to challenge your title in that respect.” 

The look he gives you is more than in enough. 

“…well, no one can say I didn’t fucking try,” you roll your eyes. “We’re doing this the sour way, fine. Listen up, shithead.” You get a risen eyebrow for your troubles, but you stubbornly decide to consider it progress, because hey. At least he’s fucking acknowledging you for a change. “I know you’re gonna go wherever you damn well please, because… well, that’s what you do, but I figured I’d be nice and let you know KK is dropping by. You know, the kid you refuse to be in the same block with, no matter how much he tries? My kismesis?” His expression remains absolutely inscrutable. “There’s only so much I can do to keep you two apart if you don’t even make a fucking effort of not being a stupid prick.” 

You get a flat stare for your troubles, before he very pointedly starts walking – hobbling, really, and why would he, when he’s perfectly fucking capable of floating his way to places without looking like a matchstick with a rheumatic hip? – away. You take a deep breath, explode Eridan’s tablet in his face because you haven’t done that in days anyway, and then start walking after him. 

“You could try not being a son of a bitch, have you tried? I bet you’ve never tried,” you snort acidly, trying to catch up. “I know, why don’t you fucking start by not guilt tripping the shit out of my kismesis just by existing? Is that a thing you can do? Hobble along like a fucking crippled piece of shit for yes. Oh good, that was a yes! Thank you so fucking much, I get jealous, you know, when you upset the one guy it’s my goddamn divine given right to upset. You’re shit at it, anyway, you make him fucking cry. If you’re gonna keep trying to steal away my spade, which you just agreed by hobbling not to, you could at least fucking doing right. The trick is to get him angry. Yeah? Remember that? Remember having a better emotional spectrum than a fucking plank of wood with a face doodled on it? Because that fucking walking stick has more personality than you do! Say something, you fucking asshole, I’m right fucking _here!_ ” 

The rush of psionics is cathartic and unintended, but you don’t even try to take them back as bolts of red and blue lash out at him. And then his powers flare in response, yawning like a chasm and swallowing up yours, burying them under their colossal weight, while he hobbles along, undisturbed. For a fraction of a second, you find yourself standing at the abyss, feeling static run in circles all over your skin, as you stare at the vast depth of his power. You’re strong, one of the strongest psionics in the Empire, but next to him you’re but a speck of nothingness. In that instant, you forget to breathe as thousands of emergency subroutines take over your inattention, while you contemplate the promise of hundreds of stars collapsing into black holes by a mere command of his will. 

Then the moment passes and the wonder – which you refuse to own up to, no matter what – melts into horror. You force your airsacks to work, one breath, then another, and ignore the way your entire body is shaking with the primal fear of standing before something so monstrously large it could destroy you and everything you hold dear with less than a twitch. Even you, with the infinite mental capacity you’ve given yourself by merging into the Imperial Network, have trouble grasping the enormity of his power. Statistics and variables and multiple scenarios bloom behind your eyes, echoing between the walls of your skull, throbbing like a migraine as you struggle to keep standing, knees weak already and further taxed by the irrational fear shoving your bloodpusher against your ribs. 

You abscond without another word, simply because you can’t force your tongue to work, when terror has it glued to the roof of your mouth. Even as you run away, searching instinctively for Terezi, you feel that bottomless well of power settle back into quietness again, almost vanishing from your awareness. 

There are many monsters aboard the _Dream Chaser_ , but only one who is powerful enough to pretend he’s not one of you. 

  


* * *

  


“You do know I love you, right?” 

You press a kiss to a shoulder as Feferi laughs quietly, before you return to the relatively complicated task of brushing her hair. It’s glossy and thick and heavy, coiling almost with a mind of its own. You could use your powers to speed up the process, but the whole point of the exercise is to take things slowly and force your mind to stop racing and allow it to settle back into something vaguely resembling normalcy. 

“I have an inkling,” she says, eyes glinting as her lips curve in the loveliest of smiles, her reflection watching your every movement as you drag the brush along the black strands. “I’ve gotten a few hints, here and there.” 

“I just want to do right by you,” you mutter between your teeth, focusing on the movements of your hands and not the monumental truth you just blurted out. 

Because it’s true. After Aradia came back cradled in shadows and something far worse than ghosts, all you’ve done has been for the sake of fulfilling Feferi’s dreams. Because you’re not enough of a selfish asshole to try and burden Aradia with the Sisyphean task of keeping your deranged, frothing, boiling pan in check, when she’s already burdened by so much. Because Feferi’s _good_ , genuinely good in a way you can’t quite understand and utterly devoted to fix everything that’s broken in the Empire. You’re not a good person, not by a long shot. You’re petty and spiteful and meanspirited. You lack compassion and empathy and find it very hard to know when you should or shouldn’t laugh about someone else’s misfortune. Sure, you want to do the right thing, theoretically speaking, but if your existence as a near omniscient, near omnipotent compound intellect made up of replicas of your mind has taught you anything, is that actually knowing _what_ the right thing is, at any given time, is near fucking _impossible_. 

You’re a genius, when it comes to coding and computers and programming and managing information, so much smarter than everyone else that you single-handedly broke all charts. But you’re terrible with people, because people are variables without parameters, an entirely foreign language you’ve never been able to decipher properly. Terezi keeps you sane, most of the time, or at least the closest to sane you can be, but being her moirail and knowing her like you do, you understand that she’s all too willing to make sacrifices and that her notions of justice are not, perhaps, what’s best for the rest of the Empire. Terezi doesn’t control you. Most days, she can’t even _comfort_ you. Equius is worse at handling people even than you are, and you’ve resigned yourself to keep your distance because even a panrotten, emotionally stunted idiot like you can see him drowning in unrequited hate. If he weren’t your friend, you wouldn’t care at all, and that’s precisely the problem. You need to care about every fucking one, and the actual number of trolls you give a fraction of a shit about don’t even hit double digits. 

There’s Karkat, of course, but Karkat is just as much of an asshole as you are, while still retaining the capacity to feel bad about the shit he does, and more often than not he is genuinely guilty about something. You’re his kismesis and you _know_ him, though, in a way the adoring and not so adoring masses will never do. And the most hateful thing about Karkat Vantas is how disgustingly soft he is, at the core. How much he fucking cares. If you weren’t there to piss him off and distract him from it, you’re pretty sure he would collapse into a singularity of caring and feelings and do fuck all for the rest of his life. He can’t be responsible for you, because you’re already responsible for him, and ignoring the fact you’re both already quadranted to your respective serendipity given soulmates, you’d be the shittiest moirails _ever_. You’d be so bad they wouldn’t even make a movie about, because people would just throw up in disgust. 

And of course, there’s the fact that there are five fucking people in the entire universe who know what you are and why, and Karkat isn’t one of them. 

Feferi is the light that guides you, the one last truly good thing in your life and the dream itself you cling to with all your might, because if you falter even for a second, you will lose yourself in the cynicism of knowledge and bitterness. You know, deep down, that this isn’t what you wanted for yourself, that what you’ve done is an aberration. No troll is meant to know all you know, to see all you see. No one is meant to suffer like you have. But who else is going to protect everyone else, if not you? Who can you trust to watch Feferi’s back and arrange the odds in Terezi’s favor and save Karkat from all those who want him dead just for existing? There is Aradia, of course, the only one you’ll ever trust without question and who sees things the way you do and understands the reasons for all you do. But Aradia is gone now and has been gone for a while now, because Aradia serves her gods, and her gods don’t give a single, solitary fuck about trolls. So you go on and immolate yourself in the altar of Needs Must, because you’re strong enough to withstand it and still weak enough to regret it. Because it’s easier to make them hate you than make them understand, and you don’t want them to understand because then they’ll see this for what it is: a selfish tantrum by a selfish grub who couldn’t just walk away, no, he needed to prove them _wrong_. 

“Hey,” Feferi says, turning around to take the brush from your slack hold and gathering your hands in hers. “Sollux.” 

You hate the way the sob catches so far down in your throat, it never makes it out, and when she presses her lips to your hands like they’re something sacred you wish your eyes weren’t dried out husks so you could cry like you desperately want to. In the vast ocean of your awareness, the universe keeps going and your mind monitors all the processes necessary for it. It only makes it feel worse, in a way, because even as you fold into her arms, quietly splintering under the stress of being you, you’re still going on. You can’t stop, will never be able to stop now, and you hate being here and not in your core, because _here_ you want to stop. You want to lie down and cry and not move, not _think_. You want this madness over and to be allowed to rest, like any other troll. You don’t want to be extraordinary anymore, because then you wouldn’t have to make the horrible choices no one else can make. You wouldn’t have to order an entire planet gone and sit there and watch it disappear and witness every single life ending in a scream, without even knowing why. 

“Hyerad must be eliminated,” you whisper against Feferi’s left fin, eyes tightly shut, as if that were enough to shut out the entire world. “I tried and tried to think of something else, but—“ 

“I’m sorry,” Feferi kisses your forehead and your eyes and your cheek and whispers the words against your lips. “I am so sorry.” 

“It’s not your fault,” you laugh, then, pressing your forehead against hers, “I chose this.” You swallow hard and don’t say: _I just sometimes wish I hadn’t_. 

“No one told us it would be like this,” Feferi says then, a tiny, bittersweet smile tugging at her lips and you love her all the more for _getting_ it. “No one told us there’d be times like these.” 

Of course no one told you about the heartbreak and the death and the never-ending parade of suffering, despite your best intentions. But the truth is that, even if they had, _Feferi_ never had a choice. Every cut and implant and modification made to your body and your mind, you did it of your own free will. Maybe there was no one else to do it, but that didn’t mean you didn’t have a choice. Your choices are the only consolation you have, when something like this happens. And your choices are the reason you shoulder on your part of the burden and keep making more and more choices, each more monstrous than the last, _because Feferi never had a choice_. You could have found a different solution to your problems, another way to do things that didn’t involve mutilating yourself and your sense of self the way you did, but the only choice Feferi had was whether she’d rule or die. And despite it all, she carries herself with far more grace and aplomb than any of you. 

“Sixty million will die,” you say, straddling her lap and forcing your voice not to break, like the brittle, worthless thing it is. “And I’ll watch and make sure it’s not in vain.” You take a slow breath, watching her intently, trying to burn the image of her into every single corner of your mind, even the most distant, impersonal bits. “Because I just want to do right by you.” 

Feferi laughs a sob, pressing her lips to yours and clutching you in her arms tight enough to hurt. You kiss back and take everything she gives you, and remember, moment to moment, that there _are_ reasons to escape your core and walk among trolls and feel like you belong. You don’t kiss back so much as open yourself to her, barebone devotion and what little of yourself you can scrape up to offer her. 

“Silly,” she sighs, brushing strands of hair off your brow. “Silly, silly, _silly_. You do right by me just by existing.” 

You reach out to kiss her a little desperately, clutching her shoulders with your hands, because you need something to upset the natural progression of emotion currently driving you up a wall. Feferi kisses back, not hard but smart, and soon enough you’re submitting again, letting her take whatever she wants from what little you can offer. One hand digs into your hair, holding your head in the right angle, while the other explores your side and your back. 

“I’ve missed you,” you purr in a near whisper, eyes half lidded and head tilted back to offer her your neck. 

“I haven’t,” Feferi laughs, licking along the veins and the tendon running down your chin into your collarbone. “I can’t miss you when I know you’re with me all the time.” 

That drags a strangled laugh out of your throat, and she giggles softly in reply, which lets you know that was exactly the reaction she was looking for. You let her shift you around, until you’re straddling her thighs and her thumbs are rubbing small, loving circles on the sharp edges of your jaw. 

“If ruling were easy,” she says, solemn and beautiful like nothing else you’ve ever known, “Condesce would have never done any of the terrible, terrible things she did.” She slides her thumbs to your lips when you start opening your mouth to protest. “We will do terrible things ourselves, and our descendants will judge us on them. But so long as we do them for the wellbeing of others, rather than our own benefit, no sacrifice we make will be in vain.” 

“You need to stop making sense,” you mutter, eyes half-lidded as you try to look annoyed without resorting to a pout. “I’m not supposed to give in to what you want just because it’s you who want it.” 

Feferi arches one painstakingly shaped eyebrow that some poor attendant no doubt spent far too much time fussing over, and trails her hands down your neck to your shoulders, where her fingers dig absently into the tight knots of tension, almost as if she didn’t know what each throb does to your head. 

“Are we talking about the genocide you’re about to commit in my name?” Her expression is teasing and lighthearted and you can tell, from the way her hands are shaking just the tiniest bit, that it’s entirely for your sake. “Or are we talking about you wanting me to fuck you?” 

You shudder in her hold, even as you remember how much you love her all the same. She’s making light of something terrible, something you know she’s just as torn about as you are, because she that’s what she always does, when you start to fray at the edges of your sanity. She’s doing it because she knows the type of terrible person you are, and how desperate you always are to take the irreverent route, when it comes to acknowledging the many, varied horrors in the universe. You should not relish this much, in having someone cater to your needs like that, but you do, because she’s the Empress and all living creatures in the galaxy must bow and twist themselves to what she deems fit, and yet she will always yield to you like this. It makes sense, in the same warped, bizarre way everything else in your life does, because she’s the Empress and you’re the Empire, and she needs you as much as you need her. You make the choices no one else can make and she takes responsibility for them, even the ones she shouldn’t have to, night in, night out, til eternity and beyond. 

“Let it not be said,” you smile, crooked teeth and sunken eyes, even as you shift to spread your legs a little wider, invitingly, “that I don’t do my part in service of the Empire.” 

“Not the Empire, not your Empress,” she says, for a moment allowing you to see how upset she really is, “for me.” 

You kiss her, then, holding onto her shoulders and allowing your powers to fall on her like a wave, spreading on her skin and trailing sparks everywhere they reach. Feferi squeals in the back of her throat because hair or clothes can’t stop the touch. She’s laughing and her laughter is like food for a starving man to you, more so because your powers caused it. This is the only thing you deign use them anymore, to make Feferi happy and Karkat outraged and Terezi amused. Your powers aren’t what define you, but they’re useful tools to make the important people in your life remember that you’re here and there and everywhere, that they’re never really alone. 

“Flushed for you,” you whisper, reverent, as her hands busy themselves unwrapping you from your clothes. 

“Flushed for you,” she smiles, working the long row of buttons in your shirt with patience you don’t have. 

You squirm in her lap like a worm on a hook, but don’t really do much to help because she’s taking her time to study your body and how you look. A corner of your mind is always expecting her to realize exactly _what_ she’s looking at, one day, and to recoil in disgust. But you never listen to that corner of your mind because you’d have culled thousands of innocents if you had. You wonder what would happen if she decided she doesn’t want you anymore, though, purely because you know that while you both will live spectacularly long lives, you are destined to outlive her all the same. It’s a strange feeling, knowing that, because you don’t think anyone else in the galaxy can say the same. You want to prepare, though, for when the time comes that you have to live without Feferi. It’s what you do, make plans and preparations and fuss about details, but when it comes to this particular scenario your calculations always turn back wrong. Everything is an error and nothing makes sense. Maybe one day you’ll figure out how to fix that, but for all you plan and scheme and make preparations, you don’t want it to happen while Feferi is still around. 

You let out a strangled moan to cover up the way your mind swaps processes abruptly, refusing to let itself sink down that hole while she’s mouthing your skin and discarding the last of your clothes. Then you’re sprawling against her body, chin hooked on her shoulder and throat conjuring a stilted, broken purr as her hands travel down your back. 

“Will you let me see you, at least?” She asks, while her claws – lacquered a vivid red, the same red of Karkat’s blood and the Empire’s flag – scratch gently around the edges of each metal ring grafted into your back. “One day? I’ve always wondered what you look like when you go back in.” 

“Terezi says it looks like I’m dying,” you mutter, trying to stay in place even though it’s hard to find the balance between the euphoria in your blood as your body overreacts to pleasure after being denied it so long and the constant echoes of the rest of yourself that you can almost hear but then remember you’re not supposed to. “I thought you wouldn’t want to see.” 

You choke on a breath when Feferi stands up, pulling you with her in her arms like you weight nothing. You probably don’t, all things considered, she’s too strong and your body is too frail, but you’re still surprised by the abruptness of the movement. You wonder if she’s going to throw you out, naked and shivering and wet – when did you get wet? You weren’t wet two seconds ago, but then, multitasking sometimes overwhelms the sac of fat and water you have in your skull when it tries to keep up with the rest of you and you start missing out on details – but then you gather yourself enough to at least try to look nice when she lays you down on the plush concupiscent platform on the other side of the block. 

“I want all of you,” Feferi says, loosening the string holding her robe in place and letting the sheer fabric slide down her skin. Your powers chase after it in a shower of sparks that makes her moan and sway where she stands. “All of you, even the bits you don’t like.” She grins, stepping closer and then lying on you, elbows at each side of your head and one knee very purposely pressed up against your groin. “Especially the bits you don’t like,” she adds, leaning in to kiss your forehead even as your bulges unsheathe and grope blindly against her thigh, “since there are so many of those.” 

Her bulge wraps around one of yours near the base, where they split, and squeezes around that cluster of nerve endings that makes your mind fizzle a little. You put your arms around her, feeling the muscles shifting under her skin as she sways back and forth above you. You cut yourself off the ghost of your consciousness and focus on the feeling of her skin under your hands and the desperate twitching of your bulges as they smear yellow everywhere. 

“Everything,” you gasp, as she tilts her head and kisses the underside of your chin. “You can have everything.” 

Her nook is cool and wet as you slide your free bulge into her, whimpering in the back of your throat as her hair falls down her shoulder and acts like a curtain that hides you from the world. She shifts above you, leaning most of her weight in one arm to align her hips better with yours, and freeing one hand to pull you closer. Her hair crackles with static as you use your powers to press against every inch of her skin, in response to the fingers sneaking in between your bodies, rubbing little circles above your groin. 

“You’re so good to me,” Feferi whispers, voice breathless as her hips shift and your bulge slides deeper inside her, lashing erratically against the walls. “So, so good to me.” 

You choke on a sob when her bulge, still tangled with yours, starts inching its way to your nook. It slides against the thin membrane that separates both sides, and you chirr helplessly in the back of your throat when she untangles enough from your bulge that you can slide inside. 

“FF,” you gasp, arching up and writhing viciously in her nook while you squirm around yourself at the same time. “FF, please.” 

She laughs, soft and kind, and gives you exactly what you need. Her bulge coils on the left side of your nook, pressing against the flexible membrane that divides it in two symmetrical halves. Then her fingers tangle with the bulge still writhing awkwardly between you, and guides it to the left entrance of your nook. You grit your teeth as she presses the tip in, and it takes it a moment to give in and squirm into your body. You chirr helplessly as the pressure builds up in your groin, feeling stuffed full and loving every excruciating second of it. Then she starts bouncing on you, short, circular motions with her hips, swallowing your bulge deeper into her body and causing sharp bursts of pleasure to explode from your insides. 

“Came prepared, didn’t you?” She purrs in your ear, and for a moment you don’t understand, so lost in the loud hum of pleasure fogging your thinkpan, but then a finger presses against the rim of your wastechute and you’re keening desperately, arching your back and spreading your legs as far as they’ll go. “Did you use your powers or your hands?” Feferi asks, pressing the tip of a claw against the ring of muscle, feeling it slide in with ease, given the thick gel you slathered all up your insides. 

“Hands,” you gasp, closing your eyes and riding out the sensorial overload your body is trying to process all at once. “Fi-fingers, really.” 

“And you didn’t think to let me watch?” She pouts, pressing a bit harder into you, forcing you to concentrate on the pull of muscles as she did. “That’s just mean, Sollux.” 

You open your mouth to say something inane – _you can always watch me_ , or perhaps, _maybe next time_ – but then Feferi slides a second finger in, swift enough the stretch is noticeable, and then curls them, pressing with her knuckles against the thin wall of flesh separating your wastechute from your genebladder. 

You shriek into her mouth as your nook spasms and gushes out genetic material around the bulges coiled deep inside you. For all the bulge inside her writhes and lashes out and your muscles squeeze desperately around hers, by the time you’ve come down from the high, you’re keenly aware she hasn’t come yet. You shiver in anticipation as she pulls away from you with an obscenely loud squelch. 

“You love me when I’m mean,” you mutter, breathless, and obediently roll over when she nudges you. 

You take a moment to shift about on the platform, finding the right way to arrange your limbs and then reach back with your hands to spread your nonexistent buttcheeks and bare yourself to her. Feferi takes a moment to appreciate the view, particularly considering there’s still yellow dripping out the rim of your nook, but then her bulge is pressing insistently against your wastechute. Your claws dig into your skin as the long, thick appendage drills its way into you, triggering clusters of nerve endings as it goes and consistently bumping against the edge of your genebladder, which makes your eyes cross a little every time it happens. 

“I love you _always_ ,” Feferi promises, putting a hand on your spine, between two ports, and then shoving her hips forward almost harshly. 

You just lay there, taking and giving and sobbing, while she plows you until you’re a smear of purring content against the concupiscent platform and there’s fuchsia rushing between her legs. 

It occurs to you, that you’re probably the luckiest son of a bitch in the universe. And no price is too big to pay, for that privilege. 

  


* * *

  


The _Leviathan_ slides down the platform gently, almost weightless until the support beams lock in place and the engines finally stop with a fading purr. It’s a strange thing, to watch the ship maneuver from your perch atop one of the highest catwalks in the hangar, while at the same time you know exactly what goes on in the bridge as trolls input commands and you watch the lines of code float past your consciousness. It’s strange but also beautiful, the way it encapsulates everything you are, how deeply you’ve become conductor and composer of the code that literally dictates reality for the Empire. Numbers and subclauses harmonize and materialize into what, if you were perhaps a sappier troll, you’d call poetry in motion. You watch Karkat step away from his quarters with a purposeful stride, uncaring of the thousand security cameras following his every move and unaware of their significance. 

You look forward to see him, you wouldn’t have called him here otherwise. 

You look forward to push his buttons in person as opposed to through words in a screen, if nothing else because that’d be more personal for him. To you it’s almost the same, but you’d rather he didn’t know that. Given all the hideous things you’re about to set in motion, you need to stock up on reasons why not letting trollkind go extinct is a good thing, as thankless as the job might be. Karkat has always been good at making you put things in perspective and remember your place in the world, and you hate him for it. 

But it’s not Karkat you’re looking forward to seeing today, not yet. You’ve made it so Feferi’s schedule is wide open for the next few hours, even if Wukong swore at you for nearly two hours about it. Karkat and Feferi will catch up and discuss the future of the Empire over terrible puns and tea, while you bask in the last remnants of warmth from the recent memory of her hands on your skin and do a little catch up of your own. You wait until Karkat is gone and the hangar is flooded by a panicky maintenance crew still recoiling from their Head Admin’s foul mood and hoping, stupidly, that by working hard and not giving him reason to be mad, they’ll help the situation any. You’ve always found it mystifying, the strange sort of sway Eridan has over his crew. You saw it happen, literally, every step of the way, and you’re still not sure you understand how it works or why. But there are few men in his ranks that don’t make a personal effort to make him happy, to the point you think he could be legitimately dangerous, if he lorded over soldiers, rather than paperpushers and menial workers. But he doesn’t and isn’t even aware of the low grade affection hidden behind the stellar competence of his crew, so you find it funny more than anything else, because it will be a cold day in hell you feel sad for Eridan Ampora. 

You use your powers to leap off the catwalk towards the nearest gate and open with little more than a twitch of your mind. You make sure to not let it register in the system, just as you make sure your image is not recorded by security cameras anywhere. The thick sheet of steel closes behind you, seemingly undisturbed, while you walk briskly down the corridor. No one really notices you, considering they are all so busy dealing with the strict protocol required to dock aboard the Flagship, and you take advantage of the fact to stroll around the ship at your leisure. It’s familiar to you, like the rest of the Empire is. The corridors and doors in this ship and all other ships, in the space stations and the planet-side bases, even most hives in Alternia, they all pulse with the same echo of familiarity. But it’s nice to explore them in the flesh, for once. Space gains a new meaning when you experience it from within the constraints of your body, and the combination of stimuli makes you oddly content, despite the corner of your mind still gnawing furiously at worry and despair. You make your way to Eridan’s office undisturbed, since all doors open to you without complaint and everyone else is so busy with their own work. You find Eridan pawing at a keyboard like he knows what he’s doing, utterly absorbed by his work. Your feet don’t actually touch the floor as you float towards him, utterly silent. Then you lean in, until your lips are less than an inch away from his fin, and smirk. 

“Hey,” you say, and dodge sharply as he shrieks like a wiggler and flails his arms dangerously close to your nose. 

“Fuck you,” he snarls, precariously holding onto his desk to avoid falling off the chair. “ _Fuck you with a fucking rusty goddamn spork_ , Captor, what the actual _fuck_?” You laugh in the face of his wrath and it only serves to make him angrier. “Shut the fuck up, you abhorrent freak of nature, I’m going to shove a rifle down your ugly maw one of these days, see if I don’t, you _brinesucking shithead!_ ” 

You float about three feet above the ground, kicking air and laughing until you wheeze. There’s nothing about picking on Eridan that isn’t fucking poetry, as far as you’re concerned. He glowers menacingly for a few more moments, before turning around and abruptly turning off his husktop. He stands up in a slouch, sulking somewhat, and starts heading for the door. 

“Are you coming or not?” He snaps, when you keep chuckling under your breath a bit. 

“I don’t know,” you say, shifting so that you’re floating right side up, head a little bit higher than his so you can leer down at him. “Am I?” 

“No,” Eridan deadpans, giving you a flat, unamused look. “But you’re going to get drunk off your ass, so there’s that.” 

You grin, a nightmare of crooked, uneven fangs, and float after him just to show off. It says something about you, and your friendship with Eridan, that you will show off your powers to him, when you really don’t care much about them anymore. There’s something nice and uncomplicated about him, something that makes you feel at ease with the world and your place in it, despite it all. You follow him into the maintenance shafts and the complicated mess of catwalks and stairs as he skillfully avoids most of the crews working around the ship. Then he leaps off the railing into the abyss below, until he manages to stop somewhat precariously, several levels below. You follow with ease, unruffled and unimpressed by the display. 

"Feel free to not help at all," Eridan snorts, hanging off a pipe with one hand and maintaining a remarkable deadpan, even though you know he wouldn’t take your help even if you offered it. 

"Will continue to not give a shit," you say, floating past him. 

Eridan lets himself go, falling a few feet before holding onto another pipe and then sliding down the wall of a tank with ease. You consider making a note of it, but he probably wouldn’t take offense, the utter jerk. It’s very obnoxious when he refuses to play the game, which is nearly always, these days. 

"I could say something about that," he snorts, coming to stand on a rusty catwalk that looks nowhere near as solid as it really is. “But I’ll refrain." 

"It’s not fun when you’re smart about things," you drawl, touching down gently and folding your arms inside your sleeves. “Ruins my fun." 

"Do you want my booze or not?" He taunts, arching an eyebrow and looking smug. He snorts when all you do is shrug at him. "You know, sometimes I remember you know about this place and I worry, Sol, I worry a lot." 

You grin at him, rasping a quiet laugh as he pats the floor next to him. A lifetime or two ago, if someone had told you your favorite drinking place would be an obscure, half inaccessible corner of the maintenance catwalks of Karkat’s ship with just Eridan Ampora for company, you would have laughed. You would have laughed while they told you, laughed while you killed them and then laughed some more at their dusty remains. 

And yet, here you are. 

"What worries you more?" You ask, wincing just a little as you sit down next to him on the cold floor, shuffling about until your feet are dangling off the side of the catwalk into the abyss below. You’re somewhere between the air processing module and the recycling sector, so deep in the bowels of the ship that no one ventures here without orders to. “That I know about it or that you _like_ that I know about it?" 

"You know the rules, Captor," he says, half sneering, half smirking, but his eyes are dancing with amusement, “no quadrant solicitations til you’re drunk proper." 

"Fuck you, I’ve been soliciting a threesome for eons, with or without the beer," you scoff, taking the offered can and grinning viciously as you clink it with his. You tilt it back and all but moan in content at the nice, bubbly feeling of icy beer down your throat. It feels like it’s been forever since you last had one. “KK would dig it." 

"You watch too much porn, Sol," he grins wryly, and you like that expression on him. 

It’s Eridan Ampora at his most likable, and you don’t really need the beer to admit that, moments like this, yeah, you could swear the son of a bitch is your friend. 

"Considering half the shit you do with KK is straight out of porn—" 

"Really? You’re gonna go for that?" He snorts loudly, tilting back half a beer in one go. “No _‘the internet is porn’_ musical number? I’m disappointed, Sol. Fucking heartbroken." 

"Hey, I’m not the one with a budding career in porn, so don’t bitch at me,” you shrug, swinging your feet a little and giving him a sidelong look. “It’s not my fault you moan like a _pro_ , holy fuck." 

Because he’s Eridan Ampora and an asshole, always and forever an asshole, he tips his head back, poses dramatically, and lets out a moan so over the top that if you didn’t know where it came from, you might honestly be tempted to jerk off to it. You punch him in the shoulder and remind yourself this is precisely why the tablet-exploding thing started in the first place. 

"See? This is why you’re never getting your threesome," he cackles, half-heartedly shying away from your fists. “I’m sorry, Sol, I’m too much for you to handle." 

You punch him again, for all the good it ever does. 

  


* * *

  


You stare at the bottom of your beer, ignoring whatever Eridan is ranting about in a low, hissing voice, and blink slowly as you reach out, through your mind and onto the rest of yourself, with piercing conviction. You push through protocols and second guessing and watch with cameras, rather than your eyes, as a particular husktop chimes to its owner. 

twinArmageddons [TA] began trolling versatileVirtue [VV]

TA: Admiral  
TA: Your Empress has orders for you

Before a reply can be typed, you download the coordinates and the barebone facts: Hyerad must be eliminated. A deceptively delicate hand hovers above the keyboard for a moment, each claw exquisitely decorated in violet swirls. Its owner smiles a thin, malicious smile before those fingers fall elegantly on the keys. 

VV: {א} So I see.  
VV: {א} They will be carried out accordingly, Lord Captor.

You close your eyes and sway in place, nearly falling off your perch and causing Eridan to reach out and wrap an arm around your back. You take the offer and slump on his side as you smile mirthlessly. 

TA: Good.

twinArmageddons [TA] ceased trolling versatileVirtue [VV]

And just like that, at the other end of the galaxy, an insignificant planet with a population of sixty million has had its fate sealed. 

  


* * *

  


“The least he could do,” Terezi says, watching in amusement as you float yourself to avoid having to fight your legs into working like they should, “is to walk you home. It’s only polite.” 

You snort, despite it all thoroughly enjoying the novelty of something not working like you want it to. Before, you used to fight your body fiercely all the time, forever annoyed at the way it always seemed at the verge of breakdown when you needed it the most. Then again, before you became the monstrosity you are now, you lived to push your body to the brink, threatening to burn it out with your powers or just the sheer amount of sleep deprivation you juggled with all the time. Now your body’s limits are an interesting entertainment to compare against the vast, endless expanse of your being. It’s almost nostalgic. But not being constrained inside your body has made you come to like the poor bag of bones a lot more than you ever thought possible. Every tiny thing about it keeps you grounded and in perspective, and helps you hold onto the illusion that you’re still more of a troll than a monster. 

You’re not, but it’s nice to pretend every once in a while. 

“Yeah,” you giggle, highpitched and ridiculous, and try to throw an arm around her shoulders, but your overshot it and nearly trip into her instead. “Like Eridan would ever willingly put a foot on this ship.” 

“His new found sense of self-preservation is quite endearing,” Terezi grins, wrapping an arm around your waist and holding you up against her side. If the static crackling around you bothers her, she doesn’t say a thing. “It’s almost as if he knows I’ll stab him in the face if he does.” 

“In all honesty,” you mutter, “I think it’s FF he’s really scared of.” 

“He should be,” she snaps back, suddenly not laughing anymore, and it’s fascinating to watch, from the overlay perspective of your drunken perception and the crystal clear awareness of the cameras all around you. 

“You’re cute when you’re grudgey,” you say, grinning stupidly as you finally figure out how to shut down your powers and slump in her arms. 

“Your abysmal taste in friendships is likewise adorable,” Terezi mutters, as she leans in to brush a quick, faint kiss against your forehead. “Karkat has been asking for you.” 

“Good!” You laugh, more of a chortle, really, as you stumble along into your block. “He’s cute when he’s angry.” 

“Yes,” she agrees, with a wry smile, “he really is.” And then she gives you a particularly vicious smirk that makes you shiver in her arms. “But you don’t want him really mad, do you? Just enough for it to be cute.” 

“I like cute things,” you snarl, then dissolve into a desperate fit of giggles that makes Terezi shake as she tries to contain one of her own. “If I told him he’d cry,” you whisper, laughter dying abruptly as Terezi puts you on a chair. 

“You did what needed to be done,” she says, and then after a moment comes to kneel by your feet, folding her arms on your knees. “You still do. He’ll respect that.” 

You stare at her arms against your thighs, and the obscene contrast between her healthy, muscled limbs and your own bony ones. You’re a wreck, and it’s never more obvious than when you stand next to people who haven’t systematically perfected the art of being walking corpses. 

“What if he flips for me?” You whisper, hands trembling as you finger her hair and push her glasses off her face. Terezi likes it when you touch her like she touches you, as if you too could see her with your hands. “After what I’ll do tomorrow—“ 

“He’ll hate you more,” she soothes, catching your hands and pressing her lips to your knuckles. And then licking them, because she’s Terezi and she giggles fiendishly when you squeak at the feeling of her tongue on your skin. “He’ll never stop hating you, you silly neurotic idiot. Just like I’ll never stop papping your bony ass.” 

“It’s a pretty pappable ass,” you murmur, pressing back into the chair, suddenly aware that the hum of discomfort from your body means you’re actually tired. 

It’s strange, the contrast between your mind and your body. The tug of sensation poignant and disruptive of the orderly progression of your mind, and how no matter how much you try, you can’t never predict it. You can’t emulate emotion, no matter how complicated the equations. You can’t reduce that part of you into a number, and there’s a fierce content in you, every time you try and fail. You don’t know what’ll happen if you ever do, but the rush of reassurance after each attempt is enough to keep you going for a little while longer. 

“And a pretty hateful face, too,” Terezi muses with a grin as she stands up briskly, “go get some sleep.” 

You watch her turn to the door, back straight and steps sure. 

“He’s not so bad,” you say, because you’re drunk and your mind is walking in circles to avoid plunging down the realization that you just ordered your first genocide, and logic dictates it will not be the last. “Eridan,” you clarify, as Terezi stops just before the thick metal panels engraved with your sign. It’s such a minor thing, the way she always sneers on reflex at the sound of his name, but minor and insignificant things are what you need right now, and you don’t want her to go, but you don’t want to tell her why, and picking a fight is always your solution for everything. “He’s not so bad, these days.” 

“And that is precisely why I despise him so much,” Terezi snorts, looking at you over her shoulder, at such an angle you can see the angry red of her eye above the rim of her glasses. “I cannot stand people who could be good,” she says, baring her teeth in another macabre grin, “and then _choose_ to be bad. Makes my work harder, when they pull themselves together, and I have to keep guessing when they’ll decide to screw up again.” 

“People change,” you say with a frown, and Terezi turns around to give you an arched eyebrow, as dramatic as ever. 

“Perhaps you aren’t paying attention at all your cameras, Mr. Appleberry,” she turns again, to deliver her line as she steps through the door, “there’s no guarantee change’ll always be for good.” 

You could say something, to make her come back. You could own up to what exactly you’ve done. She’s your _moirail_. But instead you watch her go and stare at the wall until you start nodding off, and then unsteadily float yourself into the recuperacoon across the block. You can’t dream anymore, because even if your body sleeps, your mind is still awake elsewhere. 

You’re glad, though, because you’re pretty sure all you’d get now would be nightmares. 

  


* * *

  


“So,” Eridan says after a moment, swinging his feet and not looking at you in the eye, “any reason you’re avoiding Kar?” He takes a swing of his beer. “Not that I’m complaining or anything, but. You know.” 

“I know,” you snort, and you pursue the conversation with an almost vicious stubbornness, because across the galaxy, the _Deathfowl_ has reached Hyerad’s atmosphere. “Gets you laid, though, I don’t think you have anything to complain about.” 

Eridan splutters. 

In the bridge of the massive battle cruiser, the Admiral sits back on their chair and smiles. And you hate them so much for that smile, you’re pretty sure if you were standing in front of them, you would reach out and try to strangle them. It’s a smile of content, as they wave a hand and the three gigantic prongs at the front of the ship flare up with vicious red light. 

“Can you fucking stop spying on my sex life?” Eridan grouses, giving you a dark look. 

Volts of deadly energy arc between the three prongs as the entire ship becomes a canon all at once. In a corner of your mind, information and programming rush through as all those delicate mechanisms that transform raw Helmsman power into death dutifully complete their jobs. There are more two thousand Helmsmen aboard the _Deathfowl_ , and all of them are straining themselves to the limit to feed the central weapon system. 

“No,” you say, feeling your gastric sack twist itself into knots and your mouth go dry as all indicators go green on the control panels of the bridge. “I can’t, actually.” 

The Admiral gives the order and the beer bottle in your hand explodes into nothing as the massive red laser erupts with a silent roar from the depths of the ship. 

“Holy _shit_ ,” Eridan yelps, leaning back as red and blue energy crackles across your skin, your lips pulled back to bare your teeth as the ray collides with the planet, tunneling through the crust until it hits the core. 

The chain reaction is horrifying, as the planet explodes into dust a few moments later. Then it’s over, and Hyerad is no more. Greater Battle Cruisers were made for this sort of thing, carefully designed to destroy entire planets in a matter of minutes. But even minutes are too much for you. Minutes are more than enough to get the last feeds of hives and offices, people screaming at ground zero and people going about their business, unaware of what’s coming their way. 

“I can’t stop looking,” you say, a bubble of ugly laughter churning in your gut, as you tilt your face to see the horrified expression on Eridan’s. “Because I’m everywhere. In every camera and husktop and wire and connection. Every tiny bit of technology throughout the Empire. I’m there. I _know_. I control it.” You reach out for a new bottle, twisting the cap off without much thought. “I wasn’t supposed to tell you that.” 

You can see the thoughts rushing through Eridan’s mind, in the way his jaw is set and his eyes are narrowed. He’s reviewing what he knows of you and about you. He’s reviewing what you’ve told him. 

Somewhere across the galaxy, the Admiral types on a keyboard with their obscenely pretty claws, sending a message that seems almost like a taunt. They’re still smiling and you’re still mad. 

versatileVirtue [VV] began trolling twinArmageddons [TA]

VV: {א} It is done.

versatileVirtue [VV] ceased trolling twinArmageddons [TA]

Eridan swallows hard. 

“So why did you tell me?” 

You tilt back your beer as you consider your answer and try to resist the coding flaring up in response to your anger. You _want_ to be angry. You want to be outraged. You want to do something stupid like make the entire ship malfunction and watch the Admiral blow up into itty bitty pieces, like Hyerad just did. 

“Because you’re my friend,” you say, looking away. “Because you don’t matter.” Eridan actually laughs at that, short and sharp and snide. “Because it’s easier telling you than telling Karkat.” 

You finish your drinks in silence, after that. 

  


* * *

  


Predictably, Karkat cries. 

_Unpredictably_ , he also punches you clear off your feet. You land in an awkward heap of limbs on the floor, blinking a bit as your body registers the broken nose almost clinically. 

“I hate you,” he snarls, eyes all but glowing red as he looks down at you, breathing hard and trying not to sob, and you _knew_ he would cry. You hate him all the more because he won’t _let_ himself cry. “I hate you, you shitty bag of writhing bulges,” he goes on reaching down to pull you up by the lapels of your jacket, until you’re nose to nose with him, “what the fuck made you think it was _okay_ not to tell me this?” 

“You wouldn’t have let me,” you wheeze, slightly annoyed with the way your entire face throbs. “It needed to be done, KK,” you smile at him, “I couldn’t let you get _sentimental_ about this.” 

He shoves you off in disgust, and you giggle as you float yourself away this time, rather than let gravity take you. You lick your lips, tasting blood as you do. 

“Do you want me to show you _sentimental_ , Captor?” He’s all but vibrating in place. “Because I have another fist, but you don’t have another nose.” 

“Maybe I’ll get myself another one,” you tease, laughing again when he shrieks in frustration and throws another punch. 

This time you dodge, floating back and then forward, getting into his personal space and grinning deviously as you press your forehead to his. Karkat opens his mouth to yell but you shower sparks all over his skin, sharper and stronger than you did to Feferi. For her this was titillating. For Karkat, it is actually quite painful. He jerks into your arms, gasping for breath as he arches his back. 

“I’m going to murder you,” he hisses into your chest, arms wrapping around your waist. 

“No,” you arch into him, emphasizing the height difference between you. “You’re going to fuck me,” you smile, dragging your claws up his back as he whines softly in the back of his throat. “And then I’m going to fuck you. And when it’s over you’ll admit you’re just jealous this isn’t your burden to bear.” 

Karkat makes a garbled noise of fury in the back of his throat and then slams his lips on yours. Since this was exactly what you wanted him to do, you don’t complain, even though there’s a dull, throbbing pain radiating from the center of your face, and it’s decidedly not going away. You cheat and block it out, because you’re not about to let pain rob you of the fuck you’ve been so desperately wanting. Then you put your hands on Karkat’s shoulders and grin, as with a flare of your powers, his clothes are blasted clean of his body. 

“Horny shithead,” he scoffs, but something inside you throbs with pride when he doesn’t shy away from your gaze. 

You remember Karkat, all awkward elbows and knees, squirming between your legs and trying to figure out where to stand so you wouldn’t see him. You send a ball of electricity to torment the walls of his nook as a reward for being hot and gorgeous and _yours_. He throws his head back and moans, taking a moment to savor the feeling and swaying in place as he does. Then he shoves you onto the concupiscent platform and you land on it with a soft _oof_. 

“What would you have done, if I had told you?” You taunt him, because you hate him, and he hates you, and there’s something heady about having the secret out, after all this time. “Cry about it?” 

Karkat runs his hands from your knees to your groin, thumbs pressing hard along the muscles of your inner thighs. You let him spread your legs, canting your hips to give him a better view. The lips of your sheath are pulling back, the tips of your bulges coiled around each other in anticipation. And then Karkat reaches out a hand to keep them in, pressing with his fingers hard enough to make your toes curl. 

“I don’t know,” he admits, hoarse, and then uses the index and middle finger of his other hand to ease the edges of your nook. He’s going to play foul with you, this round. And all things considered, you deserve it. “I don’t even know what I’m going to do now,” he admits, rubbing back and forth against the rim of your nook, spreading the wetness there as you shiver in anticipation. “Not cry,” he bites out, as the pressure from your trapped bulges causes you to leak and betray how much you’re enjoying his fingers. “Not _just_ cry,” he amends with a mutter, and then shoves his fingers inside, without much warning. 

Your head slams back as a needy warble pushes its way through your lips. He’s got a finger on each side of your nook, the dividing membrane between them, and as he starts rubbing his fingers back and forth, you’re reminded the membrane is perhaps more sensitive than the rest of the walls in your nook. You don’t know what he’s planning, only that you don’t want him to stop. You want him to not be disgusted, to want you as much as you want him. His fingers shift, pinching the thin wall of nerves between them and shifting as if to test its flexibility. It’s stronger than it looks, or otherwise you might have lost it at some point. You might not have two nooks, exactly, but this is close enough. 

“You never just cry,” you gasp, rolling your hips against his hands and wishing desperately he’d let your bulges unsheathe. “It’s what I hate most about you.” 

“I thought me being objectively better at everything was what you hated the most about me,” he grins, crooking his fingers in a way that has you seeing stars, and you know it’ll be okay. 

It has to be. 

“Hey,” you gasp, airsacks burning and insatiable as you ride his fingers in jerky, needy thrusts of your hips, “KK?” His eyes meet yours. “Are we still friends?” 

He releases your bulges at the same time he pulls out his fingers. The abrupt release of pressure results in a short, abrupt orgasm as your body clenches on itself, leaving you acutely aware of how empty you are and how much you’d rather not be. 

“Yes, shitlord,” Karkat smirks, thumbs dipping inside your nook and then smearing that lubrication over your wastechute. “We’re still friends.” You moan, as he continues to play with the ring of muscle, and ignore the way your body slowly figures how to react to his touch. “And we’re still kismesis, and we’ll be both until the day we die.” 

“Presumptuous,” you say, relishing on the fact you _didn’t_ prepare yourself for this one. 

Because Karkat is too impatient to go about stretching you properly, and you want his touch to linger afterwards, to burn and itch and sting, like a reminder. Feferi is loving and kind and encompassing. Karkat is sharp and awkward and rude. They both know exactly what you want and how to drive you crazy, but they go about it in very different ways. And you like that, the way they’re similar but not the same, a strange symmetry of sorts that makes the obsessive parts of your mind happy. The same corners that delight in the way your mutation expressed itself in your genitals and your horns and your eyes. 

“You don’t even know what that word means,” Karkat laughs, and then slides a finger inside your wastechute, and it’s almost too dry. You choke on a keen as he wiggles his finger a little. “Or maybe you do,” he goes on, giving you a thoughtful look, as if you aren’t spread wide before him, still dripping from your last orgasm and nowhere near recovered enough to go for round two. “God, I hate you.” 

Rather than use words – words are dumb and ridiculous and never fit things the way you’d like – you close your eyes and concentrate. Karkat makes a wanton sound as you use your powers to press against his nook and his wastechute, imitating what his fingers are doing to you. Your body is weak and frail and stupid, so it takes it forever to work itself back to full arousal. Though watching Karkat climax, and then writhe in place as you shamelessly use his slurry to slick up his wastechute helps a lot. He’s disgusted and annoyed and squirmy, as you regretfully push his hand away from you and float him up above your hips. 

“Cutest little ass, KK,” you smirk, reaching with your hands to pinch said cute little ass. He bristles a little, but then your bulges start teasing the wet, wet holes and he shivers in your grasp. “You know it’s true.” 

“You can go fuck yourself,” he glowers, and then arches his back as you start inching your way inside him, nook and wastechute at the same time. “Oh, wait,” he mutters, letting his head fall to the side, as if that could hide the fact he’s getting wet again already. “You already did.” 

“And you watched,” you remind him, breathing through your nose because he’s small and tight and he _hates_ you. “Asked for an encore, too.” 

Karkat is too busy gasping for breath to retort, so you sit back and watch him as he settles in your lap and squirms around your bulges. It’s not entirely comfortable, the way his body clenches tight enough to border on painful, and the fact this sort of thing puts strain on the base of your bulges, making you feel they’re going to tear at the split. But he’s beautiful like this, stuffed full and gritting his teeth because the ridiculous moron still refuses to stop fighting you. 

Then you lash inside him and he screams, convulsing in your lap. 

This is what makes it worth it, to be you. Not yourself, but the people who’ve found themselves inexplicably anchored in your life, giving it meaning and reason. The precious few you do care about, and for whom you’d blow up any and all planets necessary. The people who know you for who you are and refuse to let it matter. 

You wrap your arms around Karkat, sitting up and shifting the angle in a way that makes him sob, and set about to take out all your frustrations on him. You’re pretty sure he’s not complaining. 

  


* * *

  


Long after the _Leviathan_ is gone, you stand naked inside the core, recharged and exhausted all at once, and tilt your head forward as the mechanical arms descend behind you, peeling back the seals on your ports. There’s no one but you to witness the way your body convulses when the first needles drive into the sockets, straight into your nervous system. There’s no one to see your body slump onto the waiting supports as it’s forcefully shut down. Then, the arms reach down and start fitting more and more cables in place, while the rest of your mind tears down your identity and reabsorbs your memories into the whole. By the time the tube falls down around your body and starts to flood with the icy cold liquid, you’re once more everything and nothing, watching the Empire go on as usual. People fight and flirt and complain. Battles are fought, arguments are made, paperwork is filled out. Everywhere, trolls go on with their lives, oblivious to your presence or the struggles you’ve gone through in the past few nights. Part of you is irrationally annoyed by this, because you control their lives to such a ridiculous extent and nearly none of them know. Then the rest of your mind tears that thought to shreds and swallows it up until nothing remains. 

Because you remember Karkat. And Feferi. And Terezi. And Eridan. And Wukong. And your Ancestor. And even the smiling Admiral across the galaxy. You remember feelings and emotions felt viscerally, not just intellectually. You remember the rush of endorphins during orgasm and the adrenaline thumping in your veins after a confrontation with your Ancestor. You remember the fuzzy, bitter taste of beer rushing down your throat and the disjointed thoughts following in its wake. You remember the texture of silk and cotton and wool, weaved together into clothes you hated but wore anyway. 

You remember the screams of millions dying and the desperate urge to kneel over and cry about it. 

You remember all that is worth remembering and all that doesn’t matter and you remember, most of all, that you’re a troll. A monstrous one, perhaps, but still more troll than anything else. Something more than the sum of all your coding. 

Then reality melts and twists, and Aradia comes to stand at the center of the block, reaching out to press her hands on the cold surface of the tube, staring at your lifeless body with enough compassion to make you tremble. 

“I’m sorry,” she says, before tenderly leaning in to kiss the glass, and you swear you almost feel it, “you had to figure it out on your own.” 

ii2 iit worth iit?, you ask, back to screens and text, and feeling strangely relieved because of it. Aradia steps back to allow your tube to raise back into its hiding spot in the ceiling. She smiles kindly, looking at your screens as if she were looking at your eyes, and for a moment you feel like she can see _all_ of you, every corner and subroutine, all at once. 

“In the long run,” she giggles eventually, shrugging lightly, “it’ll all make sense.” 

You think of Hyerad. You think of your body. You think of everything and nothing. And then imagine yourself nodding at her, solemn. Because at this point, all you really have left is faith, and if you have to put your faith on someone, it might as well be her. 

when wiil ii 2ee you agaiin?

“Soon,” she promises, already fading at the edges. “I’ll always be here when you need me, Sollux, I’m always where I’m needed.” 

If you still had access to your eyes, you’d close them with a sigh. But you don’t, so you discard the idea of that gesture, and instead plunge back into the hectic chatter of yourself, yourself and your other self. 

You have an Empire to run, after all. 

  


* * *

  


_What goes through my mind, after waking_  
 _Up from a dream filled with_  
 _Unpleasantness_  
 _Invaded by this love that has no nature_  
 _After that_  
 _There was nothing I could do, for my heart_  
 _That split into two._

~ Hatsune Miku, "Two Faced Lovers." 

**Author's Note:**

> [Askblog for this verse.](http://requisitionforms.tumblr.com)


End file.
